Propos et Commentaires du Climenole

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A leading French business newspaper is launching a multi-lingual version of its website using automatic translation, dispensing with journalists but producing often comic results.

“Ryanair loan to make travel of the passengers upright,” read a typically bizarre headline on La Tribune’s site this week above a story in equally mangled English on the low-cost airline’s plans to make people fly standing up.

“The Chinese car in ambush,” “Internet Explorer: mistrust!” and “Assets of the continental right in management of the crisis” were some other mysterious headlines the same day on the site, which is still in an experimental phase.

But the paper’s editors are confident that the project will, once the software is refined and a human hired to tweak the texts, open La Tribune to a potentially huge international audience.

via  French paper goes global, risks ridicule with translation.

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This is totally ridiculous IMHO. For sure, automatic translations tools may help but nothing can replace the skill of a human being AFAIK. As stated in the Rory Mulholland article «…it is generally accepted that translation software cannot, as Google Translate admits on its site, “approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator.” ». This is an example of what I call Techno-imbecility or in french, my native language, de la Bêtise Technologique.

Did they expect to reach an international audience with a such botched job?

The Great Hope of the Imbeciles is to have for few euros or dollars a gadget cheaper than a professionnal, here, a translator. As I remember my youth reading, Karl Marx wrote in The Capital, that in the process of capitalism, humain being are considered useless making all focus on technology.

He was not so wrong indeed! But I beleive that it’s more a Yahoo’s feature and not a bug of an historical period…

I suggest you to check by yourself an example of a multi-lingual european news web site to see what is possible without the oddities we’re talking about. As far as I know, the English, French and German translations appear to be correct and far from the weird and comic effects of that french newspaper.

What’s your opinion about the quality of translation in EuroNews?

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